The Burrell Renaissance: Unpicking a Collection and Its Building

ABSTRACT

The Burrell Collection, which opened in 1984, was built to display and house the fine and decorative art collection given to the City of Glasgow by the ship owner, politician and philanthropist Sir William Burrell. The building design was chosen via a competition in the 1970s, with the structure fully listed in the early twenty-first century. It is one of the best examples of late twentieth-century architecture in Scotland. Despite its relatively young age, the building now requires major refurbishment, and the collection has been removed ahead of a planned redisplay and re-installation in 2020–21. The Burrell Renaissance Project has provided the opportunity to examine the relationships between the objects, the building and the public. When the Burrell Collection first opened the important relationship was that between the objects and the building, with the structure including specific design solutions for the collection. During the Burrell Renaissance Project this has been broadened to emphasise the relationships of the public to the building as well as the collection. For conservation staff, this has meant an evaluation of how the building and collection had been related, the re-examining of the methods of display, treatment, installation and maintenance, development of new methods and an acknowledgement of conservators’ own emotional relationship with the objects in their care.

KEYWORDS:

• Sir William Burrell
• iconic architecture
• collections
• place
• people
• changing relationships

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Collins, P. 2013. ‘Sir William Burrell, 1861–1958, the man and his collection’, internal presentation to Glasgow Museums staff, as part of the Architectural Fragments research workshop, February 2013, Burrell Archives.

2 Sir William Burrell. 1952. Pers. comm, to Andrew Hannah regarding his Memorandum of Agreement, Burrell Archives.

3 Gasson, B. 1984. Historic Environment Scotland, National Record of the Historic Environment. Barry Gasson Designs for the Burrell Collection, Glasgow (551/365).

4 Understanding Glasgow, the Glasgow Indicators Project, 2016, http://www.understandingglasgow.com/indicators/poverty/overview, last accessed 3 October 2019.

5 SIMD (Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation), 2016, http://www.gove.scot/simd, last accessed 3 October 2019.